Turning Pro: Tap Your Inner Power and Create Your Life's Work
Steven Pressfield
Description
Tap into your inner power and create your life’s work.
Key words: Creativity
To read reviews of this book visit Goodreads
My Notes
Book 1: The Amateur Life
Resistance and Addiction
We burn to accomplish something great, but we don’t know where to begin and, even if we did, we’d be so terrible that we still couldn’t take step. Enter: a drink, a lover, habit.
Addiction replaces aspiration. The quick fix wins over the long, slow haul.
Addiction and Shadow Careers
Instead, the addict enables his aspiration in shadow form. The additional becomes his novel, his adventure, his great love. This work of art or service that might have been produced in replaced by the drama, conflict, and suffering of addict’s crazy, haunted, shattered lift.
Why I don’t knock addiction
Addictions are not “bad”. They are simply the shadow forms of more noble and exalted calling.
Addicted to Failure
Its payoff is incapacity. When we fail, we are off the hook. We have even ourselves a Get Out of Jail Free car. We no longer have to ask and answer Stanislavsky’s famous three questions:
Who am I?
Why and I here?
What do I want?
Addicted to Sex
My own theory is that the obsessive pursuit of sex is an attempt to obliterate the ego, ie. “Normal” consciousness, the monkey-mind that tortures us with restlessness, fear, anger and self-centerdness.
We’re trying to get to the level above that.
The entity we’re seeking union with is ourselves.
We’re trying to connect with our true being, our soul, our Self.
Addicted to Trouble
The payoff for the prisoner is realize from the agonizing imperative of identifying, embracing and brining into material existence the dreams and visions of his own deepest, nobles, and most honorable heart.
Book 2: Self-Inflicted Wounds
The Amateur is Terrified
But mostly what we all fear as amateurs is being excluded from the tribe, i.e. the gang, the posse, mother and father, family, nation, race, religion.
The amateur fears that if he turns pro and lives out his calling, he will have to live up to who he really is and have he is truly capable of.
The amateur is terrified that if the tribe should discover who he really is, he will kicked out in to the cold to die.
The Amateur is an Egotist
The amateur is a narcissist. He views the world hierarchically. He continuously rates himself in relation to others, becoming self-inflated if his fortunes rice, and desperately anxious if he star should fall.
The Amateur lives by the opinions of others
The amateur allows his worth and identity to be defined by others.
The amateur craves third-party validation.
He is imprisoned by what he believes he ought to think, how he ought to look, what he ought to do, and who he ought to be.
The Amateur Permits Fear to Stop Him from Acting
The amateur fears, above all else, becoming (and being seen and judged as) himself.
Becoming himself means being different from others and thus, possibly, violating the expectations of the tribe, without whose acceptance and approval, he believes, he cannot survive.
By these means, the amateur remains inauthentic. He remains someone other than who he really is.
The Amateur is easily distracted
The amateur has a long list of fears. Near the top are two:
The amateur fears solitude and silence because she needs to avoid, at all costs, the voice inside her heard that would point her toward her calling and her destiny. So she seeks distraction.
The amateur prizes shallowness and shuns depth. The culture of Twitter and Facebook is paradise for the amateur.
The Amateur Seeks Instant Gratification
The collar is that, when they get it, it doesn’t work. The restlessness doesn’t abate, the pain doesn’t go away, and the fear comes back as soon as the buzz wears off.
The Amateur is Jealous
Because the amateur is so powerfully identified with herself, she finds it extremely difficult to view the world through the eyes of others. The amateur is often unkind or insensitive to others.
The Amateur Seeks Permission
The amateur believes that, before she can act, she must receive permission from some Omnipotent Other – a lover or spouse, a parent, a boss, a figure of authority.
The amateur sits on a stool, like Lana Turner at Schwab’s, waiting to be discovered.
The Amateur Lives for the Future
The amateur and the addict focus exclusively on the product and the payoff. Their concern is what’s in it for them, and how soon and how cheaply they can get it.
Consumer culture is designed to exploit the amateur.
The promise that our products and politicians proffer is the promise one might make to an infant or an addict”
“I will get you what you want and it will cost you nothing”.
The Amateur lives in the Past
The payoff of living in the past or the future is you never have to do your work in the present.
The Amateur will be ready tomorrow
The sure sign of an amateur is he has a million plans and they all start tomorrow.
The Tribe doesn’t Give a Shit
That gang or posse that we imagine is sustaining us by the bonds we share is in fact a conglomeration of individuals who are just as fucked up as we are and just as terrified.
When we truly understand that the tribe doesn’t give a damn, we’re free. There is no tribe, and there never was.
Our lives are entirely up to us.
How People Change when you turn pro
Turning pro changes how people perceive us. Those who are still fleeing from their own fears will now try to sabotage us. They will tell us we’ve changed and try to undermine our efforts at further change.
At the same times, new people will appear in our lives. They will be people who are facing their own fears and who are conquering them. These people will become our new friends.
When we turn pro, we will be completed to make painful choices. There will be people who in our past had been colleagues and associates, even friends, whom we will no longer be able to spend time within if our intention is to grow and to evolve. We will have to choose between the life we want for our future and the lice we have left behind.
Rosanne Cash’s Dream
I didn’t want a lofty perch; I wanted to be in the trenches, where the inspiration was.
Instead of toying with ideas, I examined them, and I tested the authenticity of my instincts musically.
Book 3: The Professional Mindset
The Professional is Ruthless with himself
The professional knows when he has fallen short of his own standard. He will murder his darlings without hesitation, if that’s what it takes to stay true to the goddess and his own expectations.
The Professional Has Compassion for Herself
A horse that loves to run will beat a horse that’s compelled, every day of the week.
I want my horses to love the track. I want my exercise riders to have to hold them back in the morning because they’re so excited to get out and run.
The Professional Defers Gratification
---
The Professional Does Not Wait for Inspiration
The professional does not wait for inspiration; he acts in anticipation of it.
The Professional Does Not Give His Power Away to Others
In my experience, when we project a quality or virtue onto another human being, we ourselves almost always already possess that quality, but we’re afraid to embrace (and to live) that truth.
The Professional Helps Others
The professional is happy to teach. He will gladly lend a hand or deliver a swift kick. But there’s a caveat. The professional refuses to be iconized.
What about the Magic?
In order to achieve “flow magic, “the zone”, we start by being common and ordinary and workmanlike. We set our palms against the stones in the garden wall and search, search, until at last, in the instant when we’re ready to give up, our fingers fasten upon the secret door.
A Marine Gets Two Salaries
When we do the work for itself alone, our pursuit of a career (or a living or fame of wealth or notoriety) turns into something else, something loftier and nobler, which we may never even have thought about or aspired to at the beginning. It turns into a practice.
My Years in the Wilderness
So when I wrote yet another novel or screenplay that I couldn’t sell, I had a choice but to write another after that. The truth was, I was enjoying myself. Maybe nobody else liked the stuff I was doing, but I did. I was learning. I was getting better.
The work became, in its own demented way, a practice. It sustained me, and it sustains me still.
A Practice has An Intention
It must possess intention.
Our intention as artists is to get better, to go deeper, to work closer and closer to the bone.
A Practice is Lifelong
Once we turn pro, we’re like sharks who have tasted blood, or renunciants who have glimpsed the face of god. For us, there is no finish line. No bell ends the bout. Life is the pursuit. Life is the hunt.
Take What the Defence Gives You
Two key tenets for days when resistance is really strong:
Take what you get and stay patient.
Play for tomorrow.
Our role on tough-net days is to maintain our composure and keep chipping away. We’re pros. We’re not amateurs. We have patience. We can handle adversity.
Mussar
When you and I struggle against Resistance (or seek to love or endure or give sacrifice), we are engaged in a contact not only on the material, mental, and emotional planes, but on the spiritual as well. The struggle is not only to write our symphony or to raise our child or to lead our Special Forces team against the Taliban in Konar Province. The clash is epic and internal, between the ego and the Self, and the stakes are our lives.
Who Is it All For?
The hero wanders. The hero suffers. The hero returns. You are the hero.
